Media streaming is commonplace in today's highly connected economy. Consumers use streaming technology to play live broadcast over the Internet or to play stored media data. Streaming presents a number of problems for media service providers and media content providers. One of these problems relates to managing limited network bandwidth and providing acceptable response times to consumers that desire the media data.
Response time can be improved with two techniques, upgrading hardware for both the media service providers and the consumers and improving streaming software technology to more rapidly transmit the media data from the service providers and play the media data for the consumers on their computing devices. These two techniques are not mutually exclusive from one another. That is, often a combination of hardware and software techniques is used to improve delivery of media data over a network.
One software technique used in combination with streaming technology is data compression. Media data is voluminous and often includes video, image, graphical and audio data. Data compression attempts to represent that data in a smaller amount of physical space for purposes of transmission. When the compressed data is received from a consumer's computing device other software applications use decompression algorithms for reproducing the media data back to its original format for purposes of playing the decompressed media data within a media player. One commonly used compression format is the Motion Picture Expert's Group (MPEG) format. Often media players include a MPEG decompression application embedded within their instructions, such that decompression occurs seamlessly within the media player.
Although a variety of compression technologies are available in the industry, none of these compression technologies are customizable for purposes of improving the performance of streaming technology. In fact, the opposite is true in that the industry has been actively moving toward standard compression techniques, such as MPEG and others.
Industry standards for media data compression have benefits and drawbacks. Some benefits include the ability to freely develop applications to compress and decompress data using the standards and to integrate the compressed data in a variety of custom applications or of-the-shelf applications readily available in the marketplace. The drawbacks are that the compression used may not be modified easily and any changes made will take a long time to be integrated within the industry. Another drawback is that because a particular compression technique is readily known, it can lead to unauthorized consumption and distribution of media data to a large audience in a short period of time, where that audience often lacks proper licenses to consume or distribute the media data.
Moreover, because an industry standard compression technique is rigid, there is little opportunity to alter attributes associated with the media data. Attributes can include such things as pixel resolution and sound quality. Attributes do not affect the media content but do affect the media quality. In some cases, a consumer would willingly forgo some quality if the media data could be received and played in a timelier manner. Furthermore, in some cases a consumer's computing environment may not even be equipped to handle higher pixel resolutions and sound quality, such that degradation in quality is not even appreciably noticeable by the consumer. If quality can be altered within the compression technique, then, in some instances, the size of the media data can be substantially reduced.
Conversely, quality need not be always lowered, since in some situations a consumer may desire and be capable of processing media data in a higher quality format, then what the media data is natively stored in. In these, situations the ability to improve quality within the compressed media data may be desirable. Additionally, from a media content provider's perspective, the ability to custom compress, and in some cases custom encrypt, media data provides added security benefits for their media content, since the media data is not easily acquired, distributed, and played when the format and play of the media data is in proprietary formats.
Therefore, there is a need for improved implementations and techniques for distributing media players, compressing media data, encrypting media data, and playing media data.